The State of Environmental Protection in the Russian ...

Eurasian Geography and Economics

ISSN: 1538-7216 (Print) 1938-2863 (Online) Journal homepage:

The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era

Joshua P. Newell & Laura A. Henry

To cite this article: Joshua P. Newell & Laura A. Henry (2017): The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era, Eurasian Geography and Economics, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2017.1289851 To link to this article:

Published online: 10 Feb 2017.

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Date: 11 February 2017, At: 12:50

Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2017

The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era

Joshua P. Newella and Laura A. Henryb

aSchool of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; bDepartment of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA

ABSTRACT

In the 25 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, sweeping political, economic, and social changes have profoundly influenced environmental protection in Russia, the world's largest country and one of global importance with respect to natural resources, biodiversity conservation, wilderness preservation, and climate change mitigation. This paper reviews the state of the environment by assessing postSoviet era changes to legislation, government regulatory institutions, and civil society. A gulf exists between Russia's formal environmental laws and state agency capacity and interest in enforcing them. This stems, in part, from repeated bureaucratic reorganizations that have progressively eroded environmental institutions. The Russian environmental movement, which blossomed during Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s, struggled in the 1990s to mobilize the broader public due to economic hardship and political instability. Since then, the Putin administration has labeled many environmental groups "anti-Russian" and used aggressive tactics such as raiding NGO offices, intimidating journalists, and instituting severe legislative measures to quash advocacy and dissent. PostSoviet environmental successes have been relatively few, with expansion of the protected area system and forest certification notable exceptions. These successes can partially be attributed to efforts by large environmental organizations, but expansion of certification and corporate social responsibility is also tied to Russian business interests dependent on natural resource export to global markets increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns. The paper concludes by illustrating how corruption, poor enforcement, and the muzzling of civil society render the state incapable of resolving arguably its most significant environmental challenge: illegal and unregulated resource use.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 25 January 2017 Accepted 30 January 2017

KEYWORDS Russia; environment; institutions; civil society; Putin; corruption; illegality

Introduction In the pages of this journal, dating back to when it was Soviet Geography and then Post-Soviet Geography and continuing into its current form, researchers and

CONTACT Joshua P. Newell jpnewell@umich.edu ? 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 J. P. NEWELL AND L. A. HENRY

scholars have written extensively on environmental degradation in the vast swath of territory that now constitutes the Russian Federation. Readers are now familiar with the country's past and current environmental blights (oil and gas spills, radioactive waste, air and water pollution) and to a lesser degree the wanton waste of resources caused by inefficient extraction and manufacturing processes (Backman and Zausaev 1998; Barr and Braden 1988; Feshbach 1995; Feshbach and Friendly 1992; Petersen, Bielke, and Peterson 2002; Peterson 1995; Pryde 1972, 1991; ZumBrunnen and Osleeb 1986).

But scholars have largely been far less attentive to what may be Russia's greatest legacy to the planet: wilderness. Within the borders of the Russian Federation are some of the most extensive (largely roadless) wilderness areas remaining on Earth. This is vividly illustrated by a nighttime view of Eurasia, with the dark vast swaths of Siberia and the Russian Far East in stark contrast to the brightly lit cities and infrastructure of Eastern China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (Figure 1). Lake Baikal alone holds one-fifth of the world's fresh water. Russia's forests comprise an astounding 20% of the world's remaining"frontier forest"(Potapov et al. 2008). Siberian tigers roam the Ussuri taiga forests along the Sikhote-Alin' Mountain Range, a region with the richest terrestrial biological diversity in Russia (Krever et al. 1994). While the forests of central Kamchatka Peninsula protect rivers containing some of the world's largest salmon runs, the oceans surrounding Russia are some of the most biologically productive waters on the planet (Newell 2004).

Figure 1. Nighttime view of Eurasia. In addition to cities, fires, fishing boats, gas flares, oil drilling, and mining operations can show up as points of light. Source: NASA Earth Observatory 2012.

EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 3

Russia's wilderness plays a globally important role in mitigating climate change, protecting biodiversity, and generally ensuring ecosystem function, particularly of the polar Arctic.

It is also notable that, for centuries, Russia's economy has been highly dependent on this rich natural resource base. In the era of the tsar Peter the Great (who ruled from 1682 to 1725), Siberia and the Russian Far East became a military outpost and supplier of raw materials for the rest of Russia (Newell and Wilson 1996). Soviet industry, like that which came before, exploited the region's precious metals, minerals, fisheries, and timber supplies and exported these raw materials to the rest of the Soviet Union (Bradshaw 1997; Bradshaw and Lynn 1998). Today, natural resources continue to form the basis of the Russian economy, with much of the oil and gas, precious metals, fish, and timber exported abroad (Bradshaw and Connolly 2016). One of the ironies associated with the sheer inefficiency of the Soviet command economy, which caused horrendous pollution and environmental degradation in accessible areas, is that large areas of wilderness remain intact. During both the Soviet era and the present day, the state has simply lacked the technology and capital to build the infrastructure necessary to extract natural resources in many of these areas (Barr and Braden 1988; Bradshaw and Lynn 1998).

Thus, environmental protection and the trajectory of the Russian economy and political system are deeply intertwined. Waves of economic and political restructuring in the 25 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union have brought a series of challenges that will have to be addressed to ensure the sustainability of these globally important ecosystems. Russia's most intractable environment challenge may indeed be illegal resource harvest (Henry and Douhovnikoff 2008; Newell 2004). But identifying underlying causes and strategies to address this problem quickly leads to evaluation of the sweeping political, social, and economic changes since the perestroika reforms of the Gorbachev era and, later, the integration of Russia into the global economy.

With this context in mind, the purpose of this essay is to take stock of and assess key changes associated with environmental protection in the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. First, we provide an overview of notable reforms to Russian legislation and relevant government oversight agencies, followed by a brief assessment of Russia's protected area system given these changes. Then, we evaluate the level of participation of the Russian Government in international environmental treaties (in particular, climate change agreements), as well as the Russian private sector in environmental certification systems and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This is followed by an assessment of civil society and the environment, with a particular focus on how these groups are increasingly targeted as adversaries of the state. In the final section, we return to the question of illegal and unregulated resource harvest (some of which occurs in wilderness and protected areas) by reflecting on interconnections with these changes to Russian environmental regulation to the restriction of civil society, as

4 J. P. NEWELL AND L. A. HENRY

well as broad economic shifts spawned by privatization, trade liberalization, and the rise of export markets, especially in Asia.

State environmental protection in Russia

Two consistent themes characterize Russia's approach to environmental protection in the post-Soviet period. First, the law tends to be prescriptive and complex, articulating relatively high standards, but it is often not effectively implemented and enforced. Second, there has been a high degree of instability with respect to which state agencies have the authority over the environment.

Russia possesses a comprehensive body of environmental legislation. The Russian Constitution proclaims,"Everyone shall have the right to a favorable environment, reliable information about its state and restitution for damage inflicted to health and property from ecological transgressions"(Chapter 2, Article 42). One of the first laws passed by the newly independent Russian Federation was the 1991 Federal Act on the Protection of the Natural Environment (Bond and Sagers 1992). Russia's major environmental legislation mandates a high level of environmental protection and asserts the country's commitment to sustainable development (Henry 2009; Oldfield and Shaw 2002).

But large gaps exist between Russia's formal environmental laws on the books and state agencies' capacity to and interest in carrying them out. Despite a solid legal foundation, critics charge that environmental law and regulations often are not sufficiently specific, lack mechanisms for their implementation, and are not enforced in practice (Kotov and Nikitina 2002; Potravnyi and Weissenburger 1997, 288). For example, many programs designed to achieve sustainable development have suffered from "inadequate finance and weak coordination" (Oldfield 2005, 75). In 2010, while president, Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged that Russia's strict environmental laws are often fragmented and contradictory, resulting in "unsolved problems, unfulfilled instructions and unaccomplished tasks"(President of Russia 2010). Russia has experimented with the recentralization of authority in environmental protection previously devolved to the regions, a trend that at least some regional leaders found objectionable due to"criss-crossing jurisdictions and emphasis on raising revenues" (Crotty and Rodgers 2012, 25). These problems continue to limit environmental protection in Russia.

In the 1990s, Russia introduced a variety of new mechanisms for environmental governance, including a new system of permitting and pollution charges and requirements for environmental impact assessment (Kochtcheeva 2010). Kotov and Nikitina (2002, 1) argue that these new instruments were "deformed by corruption, weakness of the government at all levels, shadow economy, impacts of the interest groups, and low public control over environmental decision-making." Other analyses of Russia's environmental policies have found a number of problems. A 2014 World Bank report on environmental regulation prior to Russia's WTO entry concluded,

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